Grocery stores have tiny margins and that's great. Let's keep it that way, it benefits all consumers. One way to prevent them from expanding their margins is to ban so-called "dynamic pricing".
This is hilariously first-order-effects thinking...
If any store used dynamic pricing to expand their margins, the others would just do the same and compete away those margins once again, with the marginal gain being handed back to consumers.
Dynamic pricing on personal data is bad I think, but temporal dynamic pricing is actually very good for everyone and I hope it doesn't get thrown out by some reckless legislation-writing.
That's the ideal dream scenario, but in reality the market isn't that efficient. Lots of markets gouge their customers and due to power imbalances the customers can't really do anything about it. The free market solution to this is just generally to let people suffer.
I don't see why consumers wouldn't just pick the stores that have better prices for them. Why would they know/care/need to know what the prices are doing for other people?
You can't see you mean? Consumers pick things that are reasonably convenient, achievable and known to them. These things are all subject to exploitative tactics by grocery stores.
There's also price-fixing, which famously occurred in Canada recently.
Not to mention cornering a market like Walmart would and removing consumer choice entirely.
You were not asking about dynamic pricing. You were asking why you weren't able to see the reason that consumers don't always find & choose the cheapest option. The person you were responding to was explaining the unethical realities of food retailers. There's no reason why these would disappear with dynamic pricing.
No, the entire conversation is about a change toward dynamic pricing. My comment about pricing is that dynamic pricing doesn't change the competitive dynamic between retailers. You are chiming in and saying "well there are other competitive/noncompetitive dynamics at play," which I agree with and never disputed and am not talking about.
The grocery market is. Margins sit at 1-2%, there is absolutely no reason to believe dynamic pricing would change that. Grocery stores are one place where free markets have created incredible consumer surplus because competition is high.
> the others would just do the same and compete away those margins once again, with the marginal gain being handed back to consumers
This is an assumption that doesn't necessarily have to happen. Some markets remain uncompetitive, otherwise you would see every market collapse to 0 margins if this were always true.
What happens in practice that there are only so many grocery stores where consumers can choose to shop thanks to corporate mergers and lax antitrust enforcement. So if all of them raise their prices at the same time then those consumers are out of luck.
Now technically it would be illegal for the grocery stores to collude in price fixing like that, but they'll hide behind the fact that all of them will buy their surveillance pricing data from Google [1].
Google will tell all of the competitors exactly how much they can charge you for your eggs, and you'll get the same price everywhere.
> If any store used dynamic pricing to expand their margins, the others would just do the same and compete away those margins once again, with the marginal gain being handed back to consumers.
How would you do it if pricing is dynamic and changes every day?
By the time competitor finds out about the price, you might have already reduced it, making it look like theirs is more expensive even after they applied discount.
Dynamic pricing based on personal data is not even a market, let alone a perfectly competitive one. Temporal dynamic pricing can mean almost anything, so might be ok (early bird lunch deal) or pure evil (bottled water now costs $100 because there is lead in the tap water).
The point of pricing water to that level is that it would induce other people who have access to bottled water to bring it to that market, as is desirable
No, the point is to selfishly profit-maximise. I'm not trying to be difficult in saying that. The thing you describe is not the intent, it's the hypothetical effect. It may or may not do that (I don't think it typically does, take toilet paper during COVID for example).
Yes, the point for the individual setting that price is to selfishly profit-maximize. The point for us accepting a system that does this is because it signals to other water-bottle-holders that there is a dire need nearby and pays them to meet that need.
I don't think the example of a meme-driven pseudo-shortage of a paper good during a once in a lifetime global pandemic (causing both supply and demand shocks and significant information problems) is a very good point.
You assume that other people can simply bring bottled water to market & compete with discoverability and access to customers with established players?
Or is your point that all people in a market with leaded water should be paying $100 for pure water because it is inherently worth that much per the market.
No, I assume that if anyone can bring bottled water to market, they should have a strong incentive to do so whenever there is a strong need for more of it.
But they (everybody) can't. Bringing bottled water to market requires a clean source, rights to acquire it, and a manufacture & distribution network. Plus retailers. As well, these things are often blocked to newcomers because of existing deals with big players.
> But they (everybody) can't. Bringing bottled water to market requires a clean source, rights to acquire it, and a manufacture & distribution network. Plus retailers.
I didn't say everybody. I said anybody who can.
What you describe is exactly why it's important to have an incentive for the people who do have those resources to employ them towards getting bottled water to this lead-poisoned region...
I haven't reviewed it myself, but when a mathematician calls a proof "quite poor" and experts have to "sift through" it, I would understand that to mean that it's technically incorrect. Errors like "This statement isn't correct, but it points towards a weaker statement that is, and the subsequent steps can be rebuilt on top of the weaker statement" are pretty common in output from both LLMs and math students.
I think there's more nuance to it. The real asset is the models that are being created.
Imagine this world: the bubble "pops" in a couple years. The GPUs stick around for a few more years after that. At the end, we pretty much don't train new foundation models anymore - no one wants to spend the money on the hardware needed to make a real advance.
People continue to refine, distill, and optimize the existing foundation models for the next century or two, just like people keep laying new track over old railway right of ways.
There is reason to think the differences are biotic vs. abiotic, between the two. Our digestive system is dependent on healthy microbiota. Pasteurization would be the difference here.
Raw milk is on the fringes of the same argument that whole foods play a more beneficial role in healthy gut microbiota and digestion, and that our current models focusing on nutrient composition are incomplete. It says that our measurements are off, and that there’s more to nutrition than composition alone. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11901572/
> Commercial orange juice with a long shelf life is made by pasteurizing the juice and removing the oxygen from it. This removes much of the taste, necessitating the later addition of a flavor pack, generally made from orange products.
> Commercial squeezed orange juice is pasteurized and filtered before being evaporated under vacuum and heat. After removal of most of the water, this concentrate, about 65% sugar by weight, is then stored at about 10 °F (−12 °C). Essences, Vitamin C, and oils extracted during the vacuum concentration process may be added back to restore flavor and nutrition.
So essentially there are components that vaporize during processing. The make sure to condense the same components and add them back in so that the orange juice contains all the components of fresh orange juice.
You know what's cool? Lifting a billion people out of poverty on earth. If you don't think so and still are more motivated by space opera fantasies, there is something wrong with your morals.
But the second sentence there is unwarranted. Someone can lament their hopes and dreams dying while still caring about the realistic needs of the world around them.
If you believed magic was real, wouldn't you be sad to learn it wasn't?
You're saying you never, ever, not once thought interstellar travel and space colonies might happen one day. Far into the future, of course.
My dream of interstellar travel died once I grew up a bit and learned about relativity. But colonies in our solar system and the rest are dead because of money more than anything else.
Yes, only anti-truckers can haul anti-matter since normal CDLs only let you transport ordinary matter. You have to be very careful not to let the anti-trucker go to a ordinary truck stop because things really go down if they run into a ordinary trucker.
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